Trial of the Will

I was watching a snippet of Hitchens on youtube the other night. He was taking questions, one of which was barely audible:

"Yeah, I'm invited to be unpleasant at the expense of Ayn Rand and Objectivism. Well, that's easy. Well, the novels, first, as I keep trying to say that, you know, in my view, there's more morality in a novel by George Elliot than there is in any of the four Gospels, or of the four of them put together.

I care very much about literature as the place where real dilemmas, ethical dilemmas, are met and dealt with. So to have novels as transcendently awful as Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, sort of undermines my project.

And then, though I have some respect for the "Virtue of Selfishness," a collection of essays, and I've argued about them with the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, as a matter of fact. (By the way, a state Federal Reserve Bank is not part of the Libertarian program [chuckles], though Mr. Greenspan seems a bit iffy about this self-evident proposition.)

I don't think there's any need to have essays advocating selfishness among human beings; I don't know what your impression has been, but some things require no further reinforcement." {Audience Laughter.}

My daughter gave me God Is Not Great to read last year, and I did enjoy his aggressive writing.

Very sad.  I hope he rests in argument.

I was never particularly aware of Hitchens before he started to, as Alexander Cockburn says in a more critical account than I have seen elsewhere, "wave the flag" for Bush.  He seemed obviously smart and I did enjoy watching him debate religion and the existence of God a few times. Anyway, this is an interesting perspective on his career.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/16/farewell-to-c-h/